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LEDs in LCDs

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Video Systemsvia NewsEdge Corporation

What's more, LEDs are solid-state devices that are individually
programmable. That means you can calibrate the 2180WG-LED to the
D65 white point or whatever variation of white best suits your
workspace, source material, or output format in order to ensure the
highest degree of color accuracy. And you can recalibrate the LEDs
as necessary should the LEDs change over time, although that will
happen a lot more slowly with LEDs than with a traditional
CCFL.

NEC's onscreen menus offer seven different color-temperature
presets, including sRGB and Adobe RGB, plus a programmable one that
contains 12 individual adjustments: six each for the saturation and
hue of the three primary and three secondary colors.

NEC's black box

Interestingly, the 2180WG-LED doesn't look much like a typical
LCD monitor, either. It's almost 5in. deep in order to accommodate
the huge heat sink necessary for cooling for the
hotter-than-fluorescent LEDs.

The monitor has just two DVI-D inputs on the bottom rear of the
chassis (one with eight-bit support, the other with 10-bit look-up
tables), with no analog RGB or any other inputs. There are no video
inputs, like analog component or even SDI, and that's a little
disappointing for video professionals. However, as I noted earlier,
this is a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor and is not positioned as a video
reference monitor.

Room to expand

Indeed, NEC does not take advantage of an LED characteristic
that seems ideal for video: its fast duty cycle and ability to turn
on and off between video frames. Nor is the 2180WG-LED a true High
Dynamic Range monitor that can adjust backlight brightness in
specific areas of the screen depending on the image being
displayed. It is, instead, NEC's first and currently only
LED-backlit monitor and, therefore, understandably starts with a
more narrow focus on graphics and computer imagery reproduction. As
such, it could hold great appeal for 3D animation studios.